This invention relates to instructional systems and more particularly to responsive answer sheets, their manufacture and use.
Educational researchers have increasingly looked to the use of self-instructing and testing materials as teaching aids. One device that incorporates many of the advantages of such materials and which has thus found great favor with researchers, is where typically a student is supplied with textual material comprising the lesson to be comprehanded, followed by a series of questions intended to demonstrate to the student and possibly to others whether the student has grasped the lesson. These materials, including programmed learning texts, have many inherent advantages including: no direct assistance of an instructor is required and each student may proceed at a rate comfortable to him.
Typically, in programmed learning, if right, the student proceeds to the next question; if wrong, he learns further from feedback information in the response area that he chose, as to why he was wrong. With such materials, it is usually desirable to quickly furnish the student with a correct answer, in order for the student to verify his own response, thereby reinforcing the learning process and preventing what is known as "negative feedback" which is at least a partial acceptance by the student of a plausible wrong answer which is generally thought to occur when the correctness of the student's choice is not quickly verified.
An advantageous way of achieving the above desired results is to place the correct responses adjacent the questions but under some temporary concealing cover that may be removed by the student after preparation of his own answer, to yield a permanent underprinting which indicates whether the student's answer is right or wrong. This approach has many advantages in addition to those mentioned earlier including preventing negative feedback and providing for a self-corrected test under certain formats and enabling the examiner to follow precisely the candidate's procedure in answering a question, thus credit may be given for even partially correct work.
The prior art suggests a number of ways of concealing the responses in the above suggested manner. Buitenkant Patent 2,764,821 speaks generally of a removable opaque covering; Neville et al U.S. Pat. No. 2,986,820 teaches a discontinuous permanent underprinting associated with an erasable discontinuous opaque overprinting; Neville et al U.S. Pat. No. 2,961,777 describes an erasable opaque overlayer in conjunction with an interlayer between the overlayer and the permanently printed information, the interlayer comprising a transparent barrier layer resistant to erasure, in the form of an ink containing a vehicle and a pigment; and Bernstein et al U.S. Pat. 3,055,117, which describes a discontinuous opaque erasable confusion pattern with at least 50% of said permanent underprinting being physically covered by the pattern. While the above teachings are advantageous in some respects, they have inherent disadvantages including the requirement of an erasable either continuous or discontinuous opaque overprinting to physically block out, occlude or optically obscure as to render illegible the underprinting, optionally with special discontinuous permanent underprinting or specially applied protective interlayers between the permanent underprinting and the erasable obscuration overprinting. With such materials, often a relatively extensive amount of obscuring matter must be erased to bare the underprinting.
Two copending applications Ser. Nos. 387,226 and 387,225, both filed on Aug. 9, 1973, which are continuations of now abandoned applications Ser. No. 26,450, filed Mar. 5, 1970, and Ser. No. 22,731, filed Mar. 9, 1970, respectively, which in turn were divisionals of the abandoned copending parent application Ser. No. 604,749, filed Dec. 27, 1966, each describes an improved responsive answer sheet and advantageous method of making same employing the process of xerography, but this approach also teaches either a continuous or discontinuous, removable obscuration overprinting.
There is a continuing need for a better and simpler responsive answer sheet system.